Esperanza\'s Box of Saints \"P.13-37

Esperanza's Box of Saints "p.13-37

Esperanza's Box of Saints begins with a first-person narration, not in the form of the narrator speaking to the reader, but the title character speaking her confession to Father Salvador, her local priest. The reader first learns about Esperanza through her confession, spoken aloud to the man. It is soon clear that she knows the priest quite well. "It's me again, Father Salvador, the mother of the dead girl" (13). Presumably, because of the grief the woman is suffering over her dead child, she has come often to church, first to bury the young woman, then to ask God why such a tragedy occurred. The words of conventional prayer have turned their backs on her, like "disloyal friends," Esperanza states, even though they always supported her in times of need before.

She comes to the priest "not because I have a sin to confess" (13). Rather, Esperanza believes that she has witnessed a miracle, an "apparition" of her dead daughter (13). She is convinced that her daughter is not dead, perhaps out of the extremity of her grief, but also because of her optimistic nature, from which faith springs eternal. Even if the reader does not believe in Christianity, the woman's hopefulness (hence her name Esperanza) and her religious conviction shines through. Making a confession to a religious authority also makes the sincerity of her belief that she has been visited by heavenly forces more believable, than simply talking to the reader one-to-one as a possibly unreliable narrator. Regardless, the nature of Esperanza's confession immediately establishes the character, the environment in which she lives, the central conflict of the book, and also the tone of the work and its genre, that of Latin American magical realism.

Esperanza's Box of Saints "p.38-71

Such a big funeral, so much crying, so much pain, and I buried nothing" (70). Esperanza is in a state of extreme grief, so she expresses her doubt at the ability of the rituals of the Catholic Church to heal her emotional wounds. She believes her daughter, against all physical odds and evidence is still alive, so the funeral seems futile -- hence the sense that she has buried nothing. There is a gentle humor in her frustration at the size of the funeral, as if the bigger the funeral and the more gaudy the accoutrements of mourning, the more effective it will be.

There is an evident sexual tension between Father Salvador and Esperanza, or at least, in Father Salvador's perception of the woman. Father Salvador is attempting to comfort the woman. His hand is "trembling" like "an adolescent boy "about to kiss a girl for the first time" (70). Of course, this is a first for Father Salvador, as he has taken a vow of chastity as a Catholic priest, and presumably his parishioners regard him as above ordinary sexuality. "His caress reminded her of her own father," and gives Esperanza much needed, human, personal contact in a way that the more conventional tears of the funeral ritual lacked (70).